Facebook products went offline again for some users

Facebook and its apps were inaccessible for some users Friday afternoon, less than a week after the social media network was offline for roughly five hours.

Facebook’s main app, as well as Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp were all down starting around 3 p.m. Eastern, according to the error crowdsourcing site DownDetector.com.

Friday’s outage was much shorter than the one earlier in the week, with all Facebook sites appearing to be up and running again by 4:15 p.m.

The company acknowledged on Twitter that there were issues accessing its products.

“We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience,” it wrote.

A Facebook spokesperson told The Hill that Friday’s outage was unrelated to the problems the platform had earlier this week, which was chalked up to a “faulty configuration change.”

Outages at networks as massive as Facebook have the potential to disrupt communications on a global scale.

On Monday, WhatsApp’s issues left millions across the Global South with limited access to digital communication.

Some Facebook critics used that outage to argue Facebook should be broken up into more manageable pieces.

Updated at 4:29 p.m.